


the good, the bad, and the dirty

by stopmopingstarthoping



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Canon Universe, Gen, Memories, Pre-Canon, Training
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-01
Updated: 2021-01-01
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:19:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28487445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stopmopingstarthoping/pseuds/stopmopingstarthoping
Summary: No one ever succeeded in trying to tell Crowe Altius she should back down.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 3





	the good, the bad, and the dirty

Crowe plants her feet in the training room, arms flexed. She spins through forms faster than yesterday, stronger than last week. She’s always scraping the edges of her technique sharper, grinding it down through sheer effort and the basics they’d been given in the Glaive.

Most of this prowess, though, is hers. She sweeps brown waves back from her face and goes again.

People who think magic’s just cerebral, not physical – they’re wrong, and she proves them wrong in every sweep of her arm, every crouch, every snap of her wrist.

She’s focused, laser sharp, but it doesn’t hold back the memories of pounding her fists into the face of some other brutal little street kid who thought he could just take food that belonged to her, just because he was bigger. She’d yelled something incoherent at him, but it had ended in a threat. If he came at her again, he’d need to be prepared to lose some teeth.

A target explodes into pieces.

There had been a lot of people, adults mostly, when she was a kid. Lots of people who said she’d never amount to anything, that she was dirty, a nuisance, that the world didn’t belong to her in the same way it belonged to everyone else. The way it seemed so easily possessed by people who had families, who got to sleep in the same place every night, who strolled through light summer days, who never had to be nice to a gross insufferable adult just to get something to eat. Every flame that sparks from her fingertips proves those people wrong.

She blasts a training dummy down the middle, ragged edges straining before it topples in two.

A slow grin. A single bead of sweat trails down her neck.

Other people do a little ceremonial bow before they leave the mat. Crowe fucking doesn’t. Bowing seems to acknowledge someone else, thank some kind of higher power, for what they’re doing. She acknowledges her own strength, her own hard-fought skill, with a toss of her head and a fling of a towel over her shoulder.

She doesn’t look back.

**Author's Note:**

> Someone mentioned on Twitter that nothing should be "too short" to post on AO3 and I agreed, so I'm posting some of my shorter tweetfics here!


End file.
